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JonahSinick comments on Is Scott Alexander bad at math? - Less Wrong
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This actually is helpful feedback. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the sensitivity of LWers to status? I'm not sure that I have a clear understanding of the situation here.
My comments above were not intended as a slight toward you or anyone else. I was relating factual information: I know much more about what I'm writing about than most LWers, and have high opportunity cost of time, but I don't feel smug about it.
Presumably I'm missing something really important. I'd welcome the opportunity to better understand it.
This was not my intention. I don't care about whether I get gratitude, I care about people learning from me. I value constructive criticism and explanation of why people aren't finding my posts more useful. As a factual matter, my efforts to help people throughout my life have been largely fruitless. I take responsibility for that.
Let me offer another angle of view.
As I understand you spent a lot of time teaching and tutoring math. This means you are used to being the master in the master-disciple relationship. This relationship has a few relevant characteristics. The disciple voluntarily enters it and agrees to accept the authority of the master with the understanding that it's going to be for his own benefit. The master accepts the responsibility of guiding the disciple and correcting him when he strays away from the path. Such a relationship can be very useful and productive, especially for the disciple.
This is NOT the relationship between you and your LW readers.
You are accustomed to not only teaching the subject matter, but also telling the student how best to understand and absorb it. That involves telling the student what not do (e.g. not to nitpick the details but rather pay attention to the general thrust of the argument). The student accepts this because he has agreed to let you guide him. The problem is, LW people did no such thing.
LW regulars are a conceited and contentious bunch. Even if you may feel that it will be quite good for them to accept you as a master and learn useful things from you, you don't get to decide that. If you want to offer learning, you can only offer it. Some people will use it properly, some will misuse it, some will ignore it. That's normal, that's how the world works.
And speaking of gratitude, while you may not care whether you get gratitude, you do seem to care when you get pushback and criticism (gratitude with the flipped sign) -- this is why this whole sub-thread exists.
What do you think is going on here? Why are LW regulars a conceited and contentious bunch? I've been wondering this since I started posting under a pseudonym back in 2010, and I still don't understand.
This is absolutely correct, and a lesson that it's taken me decades to start to appreciate deeply.
I'm still learning. This is actually the main reason that I started this subthread – because I had (before starting this sequence of posts) been just not taking the time to post to LW anymore out of exasperation (without voicing my frustration), and I'm breaking from that behavior by initiating a conversation around it.
Until several months ago, I had been finding it insulting to receive responses along the lines "I don't think that you know what you're talking about" after having spent ~6-18 hours to write a post to share knowledge that I had put thousands of hours of work into developing.
I no longer do: I recently studied the life of Martin Luther King, and it helped me figure out how he was able to not mind people responding in hostile ways to his efforts to help people.
A large part of it seems to be adopting a super-high status pose of the type that I did above: to take the attitude that your detractors have shown themselves to be very confused, and that you don't have to give their confused remarks serious consideration.
I think that this mentality would help a lot of LWers who feel like they unfairly have low status.
It doesn't make any sense for Scott Alexander to feel marginalized on account of how women have behaved toward him. He's regarded as one of the best young writers in the world. He has high earning power as a future psychiatrist, and is probably one of the best young psychiatrists in the world. I've found him very pleasant when meeting him in person, not at all uncomfortably weird.
Given that > 50% of people are in romantic relationships, it's not plausible that virtually no women who he found desirable would be interested in someone so heavily loaded with traits that are widely considered to be good. If he got that impression, it's a function of him having been unaware of women who were interested in him but too shy to let him know, or them just not knowing almost anything about him. All of his railing against women for being unfair to him is confused: the situation is just a huge misunderstanding.
Of course, there are few LWers who are as strikingly talented as Scott, but it's still broadly the case that LWers having been marginalized is more a function of people not having understood them than it is a function of there being something intrinsically wrong with them.
Btw, I find it slightly uncomfortable that we are discussing Scott's personal life, and he might too (yes I realize he shared this stuff. Still.)
Ok, I'll take note of this. I was using him as an example because people in the community are familiar with him and because the information is public – it's hard to talk about these things without being able to get into concrete specifics. Feel free to PM me if you have specific concerns in mind.
LW is basically a high-IQ club. People with abnormally high IQ get used to being smarter than most around them -- and specifically get used to winning arguments, if not by superior knowledge than by superior logic and rhetoric.
If you're, say, in the top 1% of the population (by IQ), 99% of the people are not as smart as you. That's enough to make you conceited and contentious :-)
Yes, I have a similar attitude, though originating slightly differently. I treat the ability to insult me as a right that no one has by default and one that I give out via respect. It's not really a super-high status pose, it's more of a "you're outside of my circle of concern, so you don't get to affect me".
However I'm not sure adopting this will help with e.g. being ignored by cute girls. Defanging insults is essentially self-defence while getting others to like you is active reaching out. And self-worth/self-confidence issues are generally more complex than just having been insulted too many times.
I don't actually think that wanting to get treated as equals by Jonah even means being a conceited and contentious bunch.
Nah, more like disagreeing for seemingly no benefit.
Uhhhh but the whole point of LW is that "argument-winning power" is a very different thing from "entangling-yourself-with-reality power", which is precisely why you can have a very high IQ and still need to learn all kinds of domains, like rationality, or scuba diving, or mathematics.
Yes, but that's called being an arrogant asshole, and I personally prefer to do as little of it as possible, especially because I know it's the easiest bad habit for me to fall into and one of the worst for my ability to get along with others, which is very much something I care about.
An Arrogant People's Club is a very bad thing to consider having.
I was being descriptive, not normative. Do you think the description is incorrect?
I think the description is correct for high-IQ clubs, by virtue of the norms those groups inform. Many high-IQ people who don't belong to those groups learn different social norms, and thus act differently.
Yes, ok, this is a good point (and an explanation that I had considered, but you saying it is an update in the direction of that being the driver).
The trouble is that then one falls into a pattern of spending a lot of time bickering, while simultaneously feeling resentful about not being recognized by the world. The sense of superiority coming from being right ends up being wireheading that distracts from just optimizing for achieving one's goals.
And when people who have even greater genetic advantages, or unusual environmental advantages, observe the behavior, they often look down on the people who are engaging in it. They think "These people think that they're smart, but they're actually really stupid and uneducated! It's hilarious!"
I myself have no such contempt, but it's the generic thing, so in practice, people who are like this end up facing a glass ceiling that prevents them to crack into the upper echelons of society, without having a clear sense for what's going on.
My posts are in large part an attempt to help LWers crack through that glass ceiling, but a lot of LWers don't get it, instead they just hate me because I come across as thinking that I'm superior. Even though the main difference between me and other people who think themselves to be superior is that I actually care about helping LWers and so talk about it, when others are too contemptuous to even consider engaging. And they wonder "why am I in a dead end job when I'm so smart?"
And it's frustrating, because I can't do anything about it.
No, once you don't feel insulted anymore, you become more confident, and that makes you feel more prosocial feeling, which is conducive to reaching out.
I don't think it's a charitable assumption that some large proportion of the people here are in dead-end jobs, or consider themselves unsuccessful at achieving their goals in general. This is one of the more accomplished social clubs I've ever found, actually, and that's been an immense boon for helping me to personally up my game by getting better at more things! Now I've got other people to meet up with and talk to who also try to get good at many related things, and can talk about that experience.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps you can dish it out but you can't take it? That phrase is often used to refer to insults, but it also applies to "helpfulness". You need to be willing to be helped by others in the same way that you want to help them. And you don't seem to be. When someone disagrees with you, take it as a learning opportunity for yourself just like you expect others to take learning opportunities from you.
Oh no, I'm very grateful to people for having helped me. Lumifer's elaboration and Vaniver's comments were great. I haven't found your comments useful yet, but I can easily imagine that I might if you wrote more than a few lines.
In the context of you "teaching" others, it means that others are trying to "teach" you as well.
This is a discussion forum. That means that it has discussions, which are two-way. The people whom you describe as "nitpicking" and "strawmanning" are people on the other end of the discussion. We're permitted to nitpick here--even to nitpick you--because you're discussing, you're not teaching. And while strawmanning is bad everywhere, what may look like strawmanning can actually be a result of you failing to communicate.
I don't claim that I've been communicating well :-). It's clear that I haven't been.
I feel as though I'm out of touch with the goals of LW readers.
When I read a post, it's usually because I'm eager to learn something from the author. I almost never respond to posts that I disagree with: it's only when I have high regard for the author that I go out of my way to engage. So I've been very puzzled as to why when I post to LW, it's not uncommon for people to respond in confrontational / standoffish ways, implicitly or explicitly expressing skepticism as to the value of what I have to offer. It's not that I'm never skeptical of the value of an author's writing: there are just things that I'd rather be doing than talking about it!
Can you help me understand what's going on here?
Possibilities that hinge on the way you post are worth extra attention if you notice that people are responding that way to you but not to others. I don't have a fully formed opinion on that, though, and so will ignore it in favor of generic possibilities. The first three that come to mind:
People are busy, and collaborate to conserve attention. Suppose A posts 5k words; B reads it and responds with "I think this is low quality for reason X," then C can see the comment first and avoid spending time on the post. B can't recover their lost time by writing the comment, but they can save C's time, and by creating a culture of quality / calling out bad quality, they can have their time saved in the future. (This is more typically a role for karma, but comments also have a function here. Comments often remind people to vote, one way or another--one of my early posts was hovering at a very low score until someone commented that they thought the post was surprisingly good for its karma score, at which point it rocketed up about 10 points. It looks like a similar thing happened with this post.)
People are confused, and resolve their confusion by throwing it at other people. "Claim X seems wrong" is an invitation to point out that the claim is not actually X, but Y, that while X seems wrong it is actually right for reason Z, or that yes, X is wrong. Norms for resolving confusion vary widely across communities, and the sort of thing that one is encouraged to say publicly and immediately in one place might be the sort of thing one is encouraged to quietly contemplate, for years if necessary, in another place.
People are attempting to demonstrate their intelligence or compete for karma by identifying problems in posts.
There is a fourth possibility, which has to deal with openness vs. suspension of disbelief. Typically, I associate LWers with being more open than traditional skeptics, because LWers are more willing to run EV and VoI calculations and try things out that might not work or might be silly, where the standard skeptic is more interested in protecting themself from wrong beliefs. Underlying skepticism will naturally generate confrontational / standoffish behavior, because the skeptic is naturally standoffish when it comes to ideas, and their standards require surviving challenges that seem confrontational. It may be that LW has more skeptics than other communities you're using as reference.
I liked your post but didn't really have anything substantive to add to it. In general, it's harder to think of good constructive ideas than to think of decent flaws in an idea. Combine that with a tendency for status seeking, and you get a big threat to productive group conversations.
Because that's what it means for a discussion to be two way. People criticize you. That's how it works.
I doubt it, because that would imply that even if you're trying to teach someone, you never try to dispel any misconceptions, correct errors, etc. You probably don't think of those as "being skeptical of the value of an author's writing", but in fact, that's what it is. Well, in a two way discussion, this is going to be happening in both directions, and just like you do it to other people, other people will do it to you.
That's not an uncommon failure mode, but I don't think it's limited to high-IQ people. Plus the usual argument applies: if you're smart, reflection is easier for you so you have a better chance of realizing you're stuck in a pit but can climb out.
What do you mean by that? At first glance, acquiring the respect of a Princeton department, getting invited to Rihanna parties, and being able to afford a $50,000 plate at a Hillary fundraiser all qualify...
Well, is it a correct evaluation? :-D Regardless of your desire to help?
I agree.
No, I meant by the standards that I imagine LWers to have – e.g. Luke Muehlhauser, Holden Karnofsky, Scott Alexander, etc. [Note: I'm not attributing contempt of the sort that I described to these people – the point is that they need to be respected by people who would be contemptuous of the average LWer in order to be where they are.]
I've been trying to figure out how to communicate the situation without causing offense: it's really hard, because people are so sensitive to perceived slights.
I had major environmental advantages growing up that most LWers didn't. Perhaps the greatest advantage was growing up around my father, as I described above. But beyond that: I grew up in San Francisco and so was able to attend an academic magnet high school with 650 students per grade, where my first year (at age 14) I met Dario Amodei, a Hertz Fellow who now works with Baidu's AI group. I went to Swarthmore, one of the top 3 ranked liberal arts colleges in the country, where my first year I met Andy Drucker, who did a PhD under the direction of Scott Aaronson and will be starting as a theoretical computer science professor at University of Chicago next year.
The advantages of early interactions with these people compounded (e.g. they recommended books to read that upon reading led me to other books, etc.). By way of contrast, a lot of LWers grew up without knowing basically anyone similar to themselves who they might have been able to learn from.
The end effect of this was that it resulted in me developing such much more crystallized intelligence that I outstrip all but a small handful of LWers in intellectual caliber by a very large margin. And I feel an impulse to help the people who I would have been without having had such decisive environmental advantages. But it's very difficult, because LWers have developed very strong priors that they're probably right when they disagree with someone.
My reaction is "that's only because unlike me, you weren't fortunate enough to have a lot of exposure to other people in your reference class while growing up!"
I'd welcome any advice as to what, if anything, I can do about the situation.
With due respect to those involved, this is not "upper echelons of society", this is a set of people highly respected in a small and isolated bubble.
It all depends on the baseline, but these advantages don't sound huge to me. Going to a magnet school and to Swarthmore is nothing extraordinary.
And what evidence do you have to support this view?
This is a semantic distinction. They're much higher status than most people in mainstream society, the same is not true of most LWers. That's what I meant.
The more significant thing was growing up around my father: that gave me a large advantage over the people who I went to school with as well.
But even putting that aside, what fraction of LW commenters do you think had better environmental conditions than I did? In particular, what about yourself?
There are surface indicators, e.g. I have a PhD in math, which isn't true of almost any LWers. But even stronger than that, I've met with a number of elite mathematicians (advisors of multiple Fields medalists, etc., professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where Einstein, Von Neumann and Godel were, etc.) who have expressed high regard for me as a thinker.
I'd like to point out that the 2014 survey found 7.0% of LWers to have PhDs and 2.9% to have other professional degrees. These objective measures are considered by society at large to be of roughly equal intellectual caliber. You probably don't outstrip this roughly 1 in 10 lesswrongers by a such a large margin.
Of course, the survey results may not be accurate. Furthermore while most of those degrees are in sciences, only a handful are in math or a close field. Thus if you consider math to require higher intellectual caliber (as I'm sure we both do) then you are still probably right about being of at least "higher" intellectual caliber.
I guess you think the expressions of high regard from elite mathematicians are pretty big indicators though.
"Most people in mainstream society" is, within this context, a very low bar. So let's say I go to my doctor for a check-up. She is a licensed MD with her own practice which puts her higher on the mainstream-society status ladder than Scott Alexander, for example. Is that the upper echelon of the society I should be trying to break into? Luke, by mainstream-society standards, runs a small non-profit and the guy who owns a large car dealership nearby is more successful than him. Should I aspire to be like the car dealer?
I don't know about LW commenters. From my personal perspective your upbringing is pretty normal and I think my "environmental conditions" were comparable. IQ is much more genetic than environmental, in any case.
First, that's your side of the equation (errr, not equation, inequality :-D). What about the other side? It's not like Ph.Ds (or people in Ph.D. programs) are rare here.
Second, your arguments are that of a child. To put it crudely, "I jumped through the hoops necessary to get a degree and important people patted me on the back". The proper criterion is achievement in real life. What have you done that demonstrates your sky-high crystallized intelligence?